"In nothing does habit and general and long-continued practice guide a community more despotically than in the disposal of the bodies of the dead."

Benjamin H. B. Latrobe. Impressions Respecting New Orleans (1819)

The Geography of Death

If man is the only animal who buries his dead,1 then the cemetery, as the final repository, represents the largest material correlate related to the rituals of death, including commemoration. In its layout and design, monuments, tombs and gravemarkers, motifs and inscriptions, plantings and votives, the cemetery encompasses our personal and collective responses in confronting death, and in so doing, it reveals much about our attitudes toward life.

According to contemporary scholarship, death and dying have become significant topics as they relate to the legal, medical, and moral issues of living and dying in the twenty-first century. Extended life expectancy, assisted suicide, euthanasia, AIDS and abortion have forced Americans to confront mortality despite an elaborate avoidance of death. Most Americans today have distanced themselves from death; many have never seen a corpse or attended the death of a family member or friend, a situation unlikely a century earlier given the frequency of disease and epidemics, the close proximity of the family, and former prevailing attitudes of private and personal mourning. Instead of the home, most death now occurs in the hospital and hospice and subsequent rituals of wake and burial are arranged by third parties with minimal or passive input from the family and religious institutions.

This situation is by no means unique to North America and it has developed gradually during the social and economic changes that befell most industrialized nations beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Recent scholarship has begun to critically examine these changes in beliefs and attitudes toward death, and the associated customs of the mourning, disposal, and commemoration in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe and North America. Both general and specific studies by historians, archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and folklorists have long-focused on the design, typology, and stylistic development of gravestones, tombs, and entire burial grounds and cemeteries as material culture and cultural landscapes. What has generally been ignored, however, is the significant role secondary activities such as tourism and preservation have played in the ideological and physical transformation of these places over time beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.

To behold the American cemetery today is to challenge contemporary society's amnesia and its obliviousness to traditional monumentality and history. To celebrate the cemetery is to embrace a postmodern predilection for the convergence of history and memory and to recognize individual subjective emotion as well as the universal human condition. In its myriad of individual tombs and markers, the cemetery evokes the human social community. Behind their walls, New Orleans' early cemeteries still provide a place for contemplative reflection, removed from the intrusions of the city. In their narrow interconnected alleys, they confound like a maze taking visitors on an instructive journey past former lives. Through the successive chronological epitaphs of the deceased, they link past to present, each tomb standing as both text and artifact, offering a group portrait of New Orleans' complex society through time. In its collective, contained, and detached landscape the cemetery presents a parallel urban world that truly exists on the other side of the looking glass.

Text adapted from remarks by Frank G. Matero featured in the April, 2002 exhibit "Dead Space: Defining the Creole Cemetery " at the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Fine Arts.

Opening quote: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans Diary & Sketches 1818-1820, Edited with introduction and notes by Samuel Wilson, Jr. 1951.

1. Louis Vincent Thomas, Anthropologie de la Mort, Paris: Payot, 1975. Back